Mullett's Corner

I haven't posted in a while, my partner and I had a baby, called Jared :) However I'll keep my baby talk to personal networks, in this post I'd like to reflect on a recent session I had with a course I'm undertaking at my institution. The course is PgC in Academic Practice and this weeks session was around 'Designing for Learning' specifically looking at 'Threshold Concepts'. The term was coined in 2003 with the following definition: “A threshold concept can be considered as akin to a portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something. It represents a transformed way of understanding, or interpreting, or viewing something without which the learner cannot progress. As a consequence of comprehending a threshold concept there may thus be a transformed internal view of subject matter, subject landscape, or even world view. This transformation may be sudden or it may be protracted over a considerable period of time, wi...

David Mullett After a relaxing 2 hour day dream fest on the train to the VLE Forum's destination, Letchworth Garden City, I arrived to a pleasant short walk to The Goldsmith Centre where todays event was taking place. Glancing down the agenda, I have to say I wasn't particularly sanguine about taking too much away from the event, not because I was dis-interested, far from it, mainly because I've sat through one of the updates four times now and I've never really taken anything from larger companies coming in to sell solutions that no-one needs rather than discuss and identify source of problems.  I wont detail all of the days events but I'd like to say that my assumptions were to take quite a swift one-eighty. Coffee and catching up with known faces was nice, right before being ushered into one of the conference rooms to settle in to Bedford College's update on their Moodle Grade Tracker.